207. Nowton Road, Bury St. Edmund's, Suffolk Installed on several columns on the residential section of this road are a selection of vintage Group B mercury vapour lanterns (though, whether they run such lamps now is unknown - they may have been converted to run SON); all still in nightly service as of April 2021.
The first of these columns is seen after leaving the A1302; an ELECO HW-918 is fitted here.
On this column, the bracket is part of the overall structure and does not detach.
The lamp is visible within the transparent bowl. Only the addition of a Telensa radio node (for switching the lamp on at dusk and off at dawn) shows the passage of time.
After a few more identical columns are passed, a pole-mounted GEC Z8691 is seen.
As the lamp control gear is housed within the lantern itself on the Z8691, the only other item attached to the pole is the supply cut-out - visible to the left of the bracket.
The bowl is in remarkably good condition; normally, these are polycarbonate and become very yellowed in service, owing to the amount of ultraviolet light produced by the lamp.
A hockeystick column supporting another HW-918 was seen a short distance further up the road.
The lantern and column are painted the same shade of light green - much of Suffolk's street lighting is this colour.
As well as the radio node, the lantern's previous form of control remains on the canopy - a Royce Thompson P42 two-part photocell detector.
No form of optical control is provided - there are no reflectors inside the canopy (save for this being painted white), and no refractors on the bowl.
Another hockeystick followed; this was fitted with a GEC Z8591 - the separate gear version of the Z8691.
The crease marks from when the curved part of the hockeystick was formed during manufacture remain visible in the steel.
The Z8591 is the precursor to the Z8896, employing a slightly more curved canopy and more prominent spigot entry than the later lantern had.
Another identical installation followed - the 20 ft (6 m) hockeystick giving the Z8591 a particularly diminutive appearance.
On the Z8591, the bowl clip is located at the rear of the lantern, but is located at the front on the Z8691 - the bowl being symmetrical, and so the light distribution is unaffected by this change.
The redundant two-part photocell detector is visible here too; this appears to be a Royce Thompson ER4N type.
At Nowton Road's junction with Mayfield Road, another hockeystick-mounted HW-918 was seen.
This time, however, a polycarbonate refractor bowl was fitted (which hadn't been clipped back into position correctly when last repaired!) - the ridges moulded into the bowl (supposedly) offering a degree of light control.
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